Amazon fixes AWS billing system glitch, some customers were mischarged billions of dollars
Cloud service customers discovered on Friday that their bill estimates showed billions of dollars in arrears, even though the services were not actually used. Amazon confirmed on Friday that it is working to resolve a glitch in its AWS billing portal. The outage resulted in some customers showing up to millions or even billions of dollars in unpaid cloud computing bills. Amazon said in an update on its status page that it began noticing anomalies in billing data late Thursday night. But by Friday morning, the company acknowledged that "rolling back the recent change did not resolve the issue," noting that the change involved the billing subsystem. The good news is that customers who are shown to be "owed" millions or billions of dollars will likely not be responsible for those charges. Amazon said billing estimates "do not reflect actual usage and charges." According to screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer's AWS usage bill for the month was estimated to be close to $2.5 billion, and other customers received similar alerts with amounts ranging from millions to hundreds of millions of dollars. An Amazon spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to Amazon's status page, the issue is expected to persist for several more hours.